News

Ant Tribe leader marches forward

By Zhang Xiao (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2011-01-05 10:00

Lian Si, who created the "ant tribe" concept, launched his book Ant TribeⅡ: Whose Era Is It in Beijing on Dec 31, 2010.

The Ant Tribe refers to a group of college graduates born in the 1980s who are jobless or have low income and are forced to live with poor conditions on the outskirts of big Chinese cities. In 2009, Lian Si published his own study of the Ant Tribe, and after its release, many people became aware of the term.

After Ant TribeⅠ, Lian Si and his team extended the area of their fieldwork to throughout all of China, and they produced a report based on their study. The latest report was also released at the launch party.

Lian Si posed the question, "Whose era is it" as the subtitle of his new book. He hopes by asking this question he can evoke his readers to think and discuss this era and younger generations.

At the beginning of 2010, Chinese society paid lots of attention to the ant tribe, and some NPC deputies went to Tangjialing, which is said to have the largest ant tribe population in Beijing, to understand the situation. Not long after, the Beijing municipal government released a reconstruction plan for the Tangjialing area to improve the group's living conditions.